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Last Topic's Ratings:
Capcom Generation 4 - AGAA - 63% (4)
Maximum Force - AAAB - 38% (4)
NASCAR 98 - ABA - 33% (3)
Ogre Battle - AGAAGGA - 71% (7)
Shinrei Jusatsushi Taromaru - AAGAG - 70% (5)
WWF In Your House - BBAA - 25% (4)
Capcom Generation 4 is the first of the series to fall out of the high range, while Ogre Battle just barely holds on.
Games for this topic:
Gun Frontier
Heiwa Pachinko Sou Shingeki
Machine Head
Resident Evil
Side Pocket 3
Super Tempo
The games in this topic have such short names compared to the PS1 topic, I probably could have fit 4 of them in the topic title.
Gun Frontier - B
ReplyDeleteHeiwa Pachinko Sou Shingeki - B
Machine Head - B
Resident Evil - G
Side Pocket 3 - A
Super Tempo - A
Gun Frontier is not totally atrocious, but it's easily one of the weakest shmup options on the console. It's an extremely basic vertical shmup that plays somewhat like an even more primitive version of the original Raiden. There's only one ship and there's only one weapon, so there's very little variety. The game features checkpoints rather than instantly respawning you if you die, and it also has some issues with enemies appearing from the bottom or sides of the screen that can kill you via contact damage and some bullets being hard to see. Pretty much all of this suggests that this is an extremely old game, and it is, it was originally released in 1990, and the Saturn version is a barebones port that has no upgrades or enhancements of any kind. There's not really much more to say about it, it's better than some absolute garbage like X2, but pretty much every other shmup from this generation is better than it, and even the majority of shmups from the previous generation are too. It probably could have been made a little better with a little extra work (ie, tossing in a couple different planes or something), but as it stands there's just not too much reason to play this one.
Heiwa Pachinko Sou Shingeki is another super simple Pachinko game. There's not much to say about this one at all, it's a collection of older-style machines with very simplistic video interfaces. This game includes one mode where you can tweak the positions of the pins a little, which is kind of interesting, though very limited, and one where you can design your own machine, but that's purely visual. Overall, there's really just not much to do here, like with most games of this type. I wonder if these kinds of games were actually popular, because I struggle to see the appeal.
When we covered Machine Head on PS1, I noted that it might have been playable if the draw distance was a little better, so I held out a little hope for the Saturn version, but it's actually even worse. The already atrociously short draw distance has been cut even further and the Saturn version is also significantly darker, which makes it even more impossible to tell what you're doing. It does still run well, but this is clearly a case where dropping the game to 30fps in exchange for more draw distance would definitely have been worth it.
I didn't really know what to expect, but thankfully Resident Evil makes the transition to Saturn intact. Generally speaking, this version is very similar to the original PS1 version, with a few small changes. Easily the most notable change is that the Saturn version has a new mode which functions similarly to The Fourth Survivor from RE2. It's a nice touch and I'm surprised they didn't add this to the Director's Cut version. In terms of the main game, the biggest difference is that the 3D character models are significantly worse. This is not super noticeable a lot of the time, but whenever the camera does a close up on the character (such as after exiting dog hallway), the difference in quality between the two versions is very noticeable. The Saturn version also seems to have slightly inferior sound quality, this is particularly noticeable on gun sounds. Still, this is very minor and you probably wouldn't notice unless you're already very familiar with the PS1 version. Either way, it's still a very good game that still holds up quite well today. I wouldn't say you necessarily have to go out of your way to play this version if you've already played the PS1 version, but it's nice for Saturn to get a good port of one of the top games of the generation.
DeleteIt's kind of hilarious that we got Side Pocket 3 in the same topic as Resident Evil because Side Pocket 3's story mode clearly takes place in the Resident Evil Mansion. The main hall in particular is a dead ringer for the main entryway of the Spencer Mansion. If you're thinking "what is a Resident Evil-style mansion even doing inside a Pool game?", you've basically hit upon the main problem with the game, which is that it seems to forget it's actually a pool game a lot of the time. The Story Mode has you travel from room to room in a big mansion, where you engage in extremely long unskippable dialogues with various characters and very occasionally take a break to play pool. The production values are unquestionably pretty solid, there's full voice acting throughout and the mansion and characters look pretty good, but these sequences go on forever and I would guess you maybe spend 20% of your time at best actually shooting pool. It's tolerable with speedup but I can't imagine playing this on an actual console. If you compare, say, The Star Bowling, which also mixes sports with dialogue, the balance between the two is FAR better handled and that game clearly still keeps the focus on bowling for the most part. When it comes to the actual gameplay, it's not bad. The game is now fully 3D, and it looks pretty nice, I particularly like the little replays showing your character making the shot and celebrating a little if they make a tough shot. The only real issue is that getting a good view of the table is a little harder than when the game was 2D, you can pull the camera out fairly far but it takes a little while, so it feels like playability has been sacrificed for style to some degree, though if the story mode was a bit more compelling you could probably still make the case for G. You can still play versus matches and there's also the somewhat interesting trick mode, though I feel it's clear that Minesota Fats: Pool Legend is clearly just a better game overall, that game's story mode is much more fun and I think it also plays slightly better.
Super Tempo is a gorgeous looking game, but like Side Pocket 3 I feel like this is another game where the visuals got a lot more attention than the gameplay. It's actually hard for me to overstate how good this game looks, in terms of animation this may be one of the best-looking 2D platformers ever made. From this generation it's probably most comparable to Rayman, but I would say it actually looks even better than that game. Unfortunately, it doesn't play quite as well. A lot of the problem is that so much care has gone into making the scenes absurdly detailed that it's sometimes hard to figure out how to interact with them from a gameplay standpoint. A very frequent issue is that it's not clear which parts of the background you can stand on and which ones you can't, since the background itself is so detailed that it's easy to mistake it for the foreground, and not enough care has been taken to things like colour choices to make this readily apparent. Similarly, it's also often not clear which creatures are a threat to you and which aren't. Enemies often pop out of the background almost right on top of you, making it nearly impossible to avoid damage, but you can take quite a lot of hits and healing is fairly common so it kind of doesn't matter, but it sort of feels sloppy from a gameplay perspective. The bosses are also pretty bad, for example for the first boss, I actually had to look up a video of how to beat him because it was so unintuitive. He has two attacks, sometimes he spits out little drills that come from the top of the screen, and sometimes he spits out enemies at you that you can defeat. How do you hurt him? Well, he has no vulnerable periods at all and your attacks do nothing to him, the answer is that you just kill enough of the enemies he spits out until you get a powerup that kills him in one hit, which just generally feels like they don't really understand how bosses are supposed to work. It's certainly not all bad, and some of the game's issues are somewhat mitigated by the second character who can fly, but I feel like it's clearly not one of the era's best platformers, I would much rather be playing something like Pinobee which is a much mechanically tighter game.
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